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World's First Molten-Salt Solar Plant Opens
An anonymous reader writes "Sicily has just announced the opening of the world's first concentrated solar power (CSP) facility that uses molten salt as a heat collection medium. Since molten salt is able to reach very high temperatures (over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit) and can hold more heat than the synthetic oil used in other CSP plants, the plant is able to continue to produce electricity long after the sun has gone down. The Archimede plant has a capacity of 5 megawatts with a field of 30,000 square meters of mirrors and more than 3 miles of heat collecting piping for the molten salt. The cost for this initial plant was around 60 million Euros."
I don't think you'd have to heat up all of your thermal mass to start producing energy. If you only need a certain fraction of the thermal mass to produce the amount of energy you need then the rest can be a 'battery' that you charge up during the day when there is extra solar radiation going into your system.
The Sahara may be a good place for mass production of solar power, but for a first-of-its-kind plant, keeping it close to home is a safer move (assuming the firsts involved don't put the neighbors at risk), in addition to needing to prove it is worth scaling up as opposed to other designs. This plant isn't wildly different, but given the cost of power plants and the demand for power, reliable and proven technology is a must before going beyond small-scale.
My webcomic
5MW for $60M (euro).. really?
That's normal. First, it's a prototype. Second, it's Italy. Third, it's Sicily.
The project started something like 20 years ago by the Nobel Prize laureate (physics) Carlo Rubbia. Seven different governments (both right-wing and center-left-wing) made every effort to cripple the project with bad management and bureaucratic issues. At the same time they poured heaps of money to dubious Sicilian consulting organisations. After a while (actually, after being dismissed from the environmental cabinet) Carlo Rubbia got tired of all these problems and flew to Spain where he built in 3 years six or seven similar plants for a tenth of their Italian price.
No, once the plant is charged with working fluid, you don't need to add any more.
What's this Fahrenheit rubbish?
In other words, there's value in the ability to produce energy at a constant rate, rather than in bursts. Because when it's produced in bursts, you will have to find a way to store it, which means a loss in efficiency.
Yeah, and fusion will one day render liquid fluoride thorium reactors irrelevant, but they've built something now, and it's environmentally friendly, and as long as the cost is reasonable, who cares? They still have something good now.
Qxe4
Our 10MW natural gas turbine at work is about 4m wide, 8m long and 7m high.
If your natural gas turbine doesn't generate the natural gas, you aren't giving the full story here though. You also need hundreds of miles of carefully sealed pipelines and/or freight infrastructure, you also need the refining and mining infrastructure, and you need to factor in the cost for exploration and developing the mine in the first place, with all the dead ends that implies. Natural gas might be cheap but its often subsidised at source, but hey so what you say, I don't pay it. If you live in Europe and the Russians want to extract a trade agreement or something from you, the cost of that natural gas might suddenly start to fluctuate wildly however.
And thats the full story.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Here we go again.
There is no "one true energy" because that is instead called putting all of your eggs in one basket. Anyone that tells you otherwise is either selling something or is gullible enough to have been conned by somebody that is. Thus even if there was an actual physical LFTR in existence it would not render all other forms of electricity production irrelevant.
Also we've got a hell of a long way to go before the practical details of working with molten radioactive materials are sorted out. I can't wait to see the "safe, clean" spin get put on liquid fluoride instead of treating it with the respect it deserves.